St. Paul was a good place to glimpse the future this week and perhaps welcome our new robot overlords.

That’s because about 1,600 scientists, engineers and researchers from around the world converged on RiverCentre for the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The event is one of the biggest meetings of thinkers and tinkerers in robotics from academia, industry and organizations ranging from NASA to the military.

The four-day conference, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, had roboticists intently exchanging ideas and attending presentations on new robot use in the skies, in space, underwater, on farms, on battlefields, in operating rooms and even inside our bodies.

“All the greatest minds in robotics are here,” said Binaya Acharya, marketing manager with Recon Robotic, an Edina-based company that brought a simulated Afghan village building to show off its scout robot designed for military and law enforcement use.

“When you’re in the robotics field, this is the place you want to be. This is where all the leaders in the industry are,” said Celia Holmes, a recruiter with da Vinci Surgery, which spent tens of thousands of dollars to haul a surgical robot from Silicon Valley to the RiverCentre so conference attendees could try their hand at a high-tech version of the “Operation” game.

The conference included presentations on robots modeled after swimming fish, slithering snakes and octopus limbs. Here’s where you could learn about work that is being done on dancing robots, running robots, hopping robots, climbing robots and wearable robots. And there were discussions of robots capable of walking up stairs, clinging to clothing, learning language, recognizing humans and taking commands from mobility impaired infants.

WORLDWIDE WORK

In Indianapolis, work is being done on an “autonomous robotic golf greens mower,” while in Spain researchers are working on “using depth and appearance features for informed robot grasping of highly wrinkled clothes.”

From Japan came news of “the world’s first hair-washing robot equipped with scrubbing fingers,” as well as “the world’s first attempt at realizing two-ball juggling in one hand using a robotic hand-arm.”

Developing a juggling robot may seem like a trivial quest, although the conference also included a daylong workshop on robotics and the performing arts, which featured discussions of robots as protagonists, cyborg cabaret and “Artistic Elements and Practical Challenges in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ with Unmanned Vehicles.”

Robotics experts say that seemingly whimsical tasks like teaching a robot how to slide a magnetic card through a card reader actually help advance the state of the art.

“These challenges are intended to advance the field,” said Sachin Chitta, a research scientist at another Silicon Valley company that brought a couple of PR2 personal robots to participate in a “sushi manipulation challenge.”

That was a competition in which teams of researchers were invited to teach a PR2 robot how to be a server in a sushi restaurant, setting tables and clearing dishes, cups and flatware.

On Wednesday, May 16, a team of researchers from Belgium, Germany and Brown University coached a PR2 — dubbed Kiko — through the task. Kiko, alas, probably wouldn’t have earned much of a tip from the nearby Sakura Japanese restaurant where the researchers got the chopsticks for the demonstration.

The robot dropped a cup, and then its lifeless laser eyes stared at an empty table while its silicon grippers futilely plucked at shadows of objects that weren’t there.

But then the machine approached a little red miso soup bowl on a lazy Susan. As a small audience of researchers watched and taped the encounter with their cellphones, Kiko lowered its arms. It studied the slowly rotating bowl. Almost two minutes crawled by, as the bowl went around once, twice, three times. Then, Kiko twisted its shoulder joint in a way no human could and snatched up the bowl to a smattering of applause and comments of “Bravo” and “That’s awesome.”

“One of the biggest issues is manipulation,” said Maria Gini, a University of Minnesota professor of computer science and engineering. “It can grasp a dish, but it’s not very elegant, it’s not very efficient.”

But robots will have to learn to get better at functioning in a human household environment as opposed to a factory, according to Gini, because, “One of the biggest markets for the future of robotics is to help people live in their home longer.”

ITTY BITTY ROBOTS

The conference also featured a much smaller example of robotics prowess, the mobile microrobotics challenge.

That envelope-pushing task required teams to maneuver a robot no larger than a half a millimeter — about the size of the period at the end of this sentence — through a figure-eight slalom course set up within a 3.5-millimeter-by-2-millimeter rectangular space

A few years ago, research teams were barely able to reliably move their tiny robots in a straight line, said Jason Gorman, an engineer with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

But this year, the nine teams from the United States, Canada, France and the Czech Republic were all able to maneuver their robots through the course as spectators watched on a screen projecting an image captured by a microscope.

The robots used by most teams were teeny magnet specks that were maneuvered using electromagnetic coils. But researchers from the University of Hawaii came up with a novel solution that challenged the notion of what is a robot. Their competitor was a wee bubble created by a laser beam in a pool of oil.

The winning team from France was able to smash a previous record for the event by shooting its robot through the course in about a half second.

The microrobotics teams also completed another task called a microassembly, in which the devices were supposed to push tiny triangular objects into a narrow channel.

A team of four engineering seniors from the U.S. Naval Academy spent the past academic year developing their microrobot, which maneuvers between a layer of oil and saltwater. The Navy came in third in the slalom race and second in the microassembly task.

“It’s kind of like playing a computer game online,” said Matthew Prevatt, a Naval Academy midshipman. The scholar warriors said the competition was a worthwhile lesson in teamwork and engineering problem solving.

And according to Gorman, their efforts played a part in advancing a segment of the field that may someday be able to dispatch little medical robots into the human body to deliver drugs to the retina of the eye or to scrub out clogged arteries.

“It’s going to change the way medicine is going to be done,” Gini said.

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